by Lunch Lydia
We’d take long breaks from the set, wandering into the wooded gulleys which flanked the massive crumbling estate in which we’d been marooned for weeks. I was endeared to his European upbringing, higher education, and relaxed good manners. A different species altogether. Admitted, much like myself, to being indifferent to remorse, jealousy, guilt. Claimed the well of his emotion was a shallow pool beyond which intellect was the master. Reason took over when the heartstrings swelled, sparing him the self-inflicted wounds of lost love, fractured ego, tortured relationships. A challenge to find the pocket in which he smoldered.
He’d seduce me with stolen passages from Blanchot, Bataille, Foucault. I’d escape into small monologues whose beauty filled me with ennui, melancholy. When reduced to the verge of tears, he’d laugh softly, cooing that it was time to return to work. The film was ready to wrap.
Styn suggested we celebrate, inviting me over for dinner. A second-floor bachelor pad overlooking one of the many canals crisscrossing the city. Soft white lights, non-descript music made no mention of the nightmare which was to follow. Smooth white fish, a tureen of pale soup, fruit, wine. Simple. Elegant.
Until I became nauseous. Dizzy. We hadn’t even finished the meal before a small spin circled the edges of the room. My vision jellied. I was on the verge of collapsing. Drunk, but not on wine. I questioned whether he had drugged my drink … perhaps a slight poisoning. A mild arsenic. Belladonna. Blue of Noon played itself out. Styn appeared concerned, yet amused by my predicament. Led me gently to his bed, began to bathe my face with a cool cloth. Suggested that perhaps the food was too rich, too sweet, spoiled. He began to flatter me, cooing how beautifully sickness suited me. How it created a lustrous pallor, a luminous sheen to my already pale skin. He claimed I was radiant, enthralling, a vision. It was making him hard. Erect. Would I mind if he simply released himself from his trousers, allowing his excitement some breathing room. He was choking in his pants. Murmuring all the while how sickness became me.
I begged him to assist me to the bathroom. I could no longer control the spasms racking my body. I needed to vomit, piss, shit. I was about to soil myself. He lovingly removed my dress, panties, bra, folding them neatly, and arranged them on the towel rack. His sophisticated manners reminding me of a well-paid man servant. He insisted I kneel at the toilet, purge myself, not be shy. He’d stay to help me. He hovered beside me, checking pulse, my temperature. The pupils of my eyes. The glare of the stark white tiles reflected off each other causing a vertiginous blur. My stomach heaved. I began to expel copious amounts of food, bile. Simultaneously pissing, shitting, all over the toilet, the tiles, my thighs. Racked with convulsions, my insides shooting out from every opening.
Passing in and out of consciousness. I lost track of time. Had no idea how long I lay crumpled beside the toilet. Shivering. My belly rumbling. The rapid-fire machinegunning from the shutter of his camera startling me. The bastard had been photographing my entire seizure. Slowly I began to recover. Had the strength to raise my head, ask for a glass of water. Styn smiled sweetly, turning the shower on. Removing the huge gooseneck from the wall. Testing the temperature. He aimed it at the tiles above my head, a baptism of cool spray. He traced my outline on the floor, tickled my feet with pulsing jets, adjusting the nozzle, running the liquid massage up between my legs. Seductively upping the force. Holding it there just long enough for my pulse to race.
Then he hit my mouth. A cold hard fist of water, forcing lips apart, forcing me to swallow. Smiling as I began to choke. Shiver. He started to pull on his prick, which had remained exposed during the entire episode. Giving it a few strong pulls as he continued to focus the camera. Prodding my legs apart with the tip of his shoe. Planting a thick hose of water against my tiny blossom. My legs began a spastic thrash. My head pounding. Dry heaves ebbing. Orgasm mounting. The occasional flash bouncing off the white walls. I was too weak to protest. Vanity was useless. We both exploded. Burning this sickly vision into our collective memories like a short film for future recall.
He dropped the shower hose and knelt beside me. Kissing my feet. Murmuring in French, German, Dutch, litanies to my beauty. Gently washing me. An angelic smile kissing his lips. I was completely exhausted, paralyzed with fatigue. He carried me to his bed. Urging me to rest, sleep, gather my strength. Unable to protest the notes he was taking as the camera rewound.
CHARLES MANSON IS IN MY HEART ALL WAYS … was spray-painted in black two-foot-high letters that ran the length of the abandoned hallway. I was still sore from battling the pitted streets of Hackney on the back of his Harley. “Smiffy”—which sounds like a child’s tattered teddy bear, but looked like a greasy grizzly outlaw biker—smirked, “Pritty, ain’t it …” as he led me up to the third floor of a rancid squat.
Garbage littered the gangplank, stairwell, doorways, and even dangled from the banister and light sockets. Discarded filthy remnants once worn as clothes steamed in piles. Mountains of leftover Kentucky Fried Chicken bones mingled with fish-and-chip plastic takeaway plates which wrestled Curry to Go styrofoam and fought it out in the corners. The overall aroma, an intoxicating concoction of rotting flesh and excrement, escalated the nausea tap dancing up my esophagus. “Home sweet home,” the scruffy genius muttered. A man of few words. I coughed up a spittle of vomit.
Smiffy had been recommended to me as a trusted “collector.” If you were owed money, favors, or just wanted to fuck with someone’s well-being/paranoia, HE was the man to call. I had no urgent business requiring his services, but at 6’2” and 263 pounds I felt him a necessary addition to my loose-knit stable.
We left the bar on his bike stupidly shit-faced and ended up at his place miles outside of the city. All I wanted was a quick, cheap, dirty fuck. And the possibility of employing his unique talents sometime in the future. My patience was already exhausted by the time he kicked open the door to his room. “It only locks from the inside” was little consolation. I was sobering up quick.
I asked where the toilet was. He pointed at the corner. Asked if I wanted to use a T-shirt to wipe myself, but drip-drying seemed more hygienic. I squatted facing him, slunk my tight black pants over my ass, around my knees, and pissed out the multiple vodkas I had consumed earlier. Right on the floor, a massive puddle swimming slowly toward his filthy mattress in the center of the room. A long sigh caresses my lips, a small shudder ripples my flesh, and Smiffy stumbles over, drops to all fours, and washes the last few trickles from my pussy. The smell of hot piss perfuming his pigsty. Alters the electricity in the atmosphere. The heat radiating outward warms the room by degrees. Charged particles perform an exotic ballet pirouetting off of dust motes.
His filthy tongue laps at my steamy mound like a hungry bear devouring a candy wrapper. He whips off his leather jacket, bathing huge hands and bulging biceps in the puddle of pissy liquor. Licking fingers and forearms, he offers me a taste. Dabbing my lips with two fat thumbs shoved roughly in my mouth. He sucks up a thick wad of mucus, phlegm, and bile, spitting it deep inside my throat. I swallow it halfway down, allowing his juices to mingle with mine. Spit it right back at him. He pulls his prick free. Begins slapping it against the rough rotten piss-soaked floorboards. Pounding it mercilessly against the wood. Strangling the beast in a meaty fist, punishing the head. Pumping in grand agitation. Attempting to screw a hole in the floor. I suppress the laughter ping-ponging inside my belly. In a drunken stupor it doesn’t matter what you fuck. As long as you’re fucking something.
His grotesque moaning, the squelching of his fevered sex, and the creaking wood sound a song of diseased lust. The alcohol races through my blood, causing the room to spin. The vomit fermenting in my empty stomach launches itself upward, exploding from my mouth and nose. A small thick hot wad lands on his foreskin. In drunken delirium he explodes. His come, the vomit, and piss forging unholy matrimony in a fetid puddle at my feet. I laugh out loud as he rolls over, blows me a kiss, and whispers, “Ged night, doll …” Passing out.
I clean myself up,
walk to the corner, and wait forty minutes for a car service to arrive. The morning sun bleeding slowly through the night sky. A grin twists my lips. I’ll never see him again. Unless I need “collecting.”
I had left Amsterdam a few days after my date with Styn. Took the night ferry to London. Called Murray, who I had met in Los Angeles. Offered if I ever needed a place to stay … I did.
He took me in. Hot road worker. As quiet as a cat burglar. Would leave for weeks at a time. Following the path of his own indiscretions. Kept our questions to ourselves. Open relationship. He loved torturing himself by sleeping on the couch, listening to me get fucked from the other room. Jerk off and dream. Leave early the next morning so as not to witness whatever it was I dragged out of bed. The only time I pissed him off was after an all-nighter with a punk junkie rock singer who scrawled his name in blood on the bedroom wall. Used a crusty syringe as magic marker. Told Murray if he didn’t appreciate the autograph to go and scrub it off with bleach. That blew his cool. Furious, he stormed out. Didn’t matter. I had a date that afternoon with J.G.
I had been seeing J.G. for a couple of weeks. Set out to steal his vows of celibacy. I was turned on by his thousand-yard stare, eyes that went on for miles. Reticence. His tortured genius wrestling libido. Decided to commit date rape. Fed him vodka and codeine to ease the pain. We soon became inseparable. Binge on Ecstasy. Trip over to his place on the fifteenth floor of a subsidized housing project in Brixton. Have hours of lushly orchestrated sex. A divine high, we’d cling to each other, fearful of slipping between the cracks in the floorboards. Dreamed we’d one day wake up to find ourselves melted like puddles, evaporated by the sun.
It was the first relationship I’d had where intimacy didn’t equate with violation. I’m not sure J.G. felt the same way. I was still occasionally balling the road worker, a few of his friends, and our mutual acquaintances. Which in itself wasn’t as awful as my insatiable need to reveal in revolting detail the every nuance of my many indiscretions. It forced him into the voyeur’s peephole. Whose microscopic magnification played itself out like a recurring nightmare. I adored him, yet it was impossible for me to curb my voracious philandering, sexual misanthropy, or gruesome revelations encapsulating the horrors inflicted upon my latest plaything, used and discarded like a broken toy whose warranty had expired.
Where all of my previous affairs had used creative energy to stimulate drama, we would construct drama by stimulating our creative energies. Both consumed with the art of self-flagellant confessionals, melodramatic operettas, musical Grand Guignol. Obsessed with creating gargantuan bodies of work which we would inflict upon the paying public. A variety of grotesque performances, the scope of whose horrific beauty is better left to the textbooks. We would tour Europe, Japan, the States, no spectator safe from the multi-tentacled lacerations that sprung from the hotbed of our philosophical sadomasochism.
The mobility we were afforded benefited our longevity. Stagnation the death of every relationship. While we travelled, caroused, performed, we shared a blissful coexistence. He was reserved, sensitive, introspective. I was obnoxious, arrogant, an exhibitionist. Polar opposites attracted to a higher middle ground.
*
London was beat. Back to New York with J.G. I’d been gone for four years. Returned to a crumpled city crucified beyond repair. A giant electromagnetic force field feeding you false fuels. Agitates the nerve endings. Resulting in that chronic itch for more. And the more you get, the more you want. And more is never enough. Until it’s too much. Until your life force feels like it’s being continually sucked, milked, gnawed upon, ingested, digested, and spat back at you by an army of living ghosts endlessly haunting a city whose borders are stretched to the point of utter insanity. And try keeping your sanity in New York. I dare you. The air itself is a psychotropic narcotic that accelerates the pulse rate.
And like any drug, you do too much, you feel filthied. Dirty. Rotting from the inside out. Never clean enough. Never free from the microbiotic flesh-eating bacteria. Never free from the botulisms, the staphylococcus, the airborne viruses, the tuberculosis, the sickness. No matter what lengths you go to to keep yourself clean. There is no safe distance once you’ve already been infected. A carrier full of diseased shrapnel. Sick to death of what passes for life. Sick of the stench of the living dead. The stench of urine, yeast, and rotting corpses, both living and dead, which assault the olfactories. Contaminated by small pools of viscous liquid which puddle in doorways, subways, sidewalks. Overhead pipes which leak a puslike foul fluid tinged with toxic sludge and gasoline. Bathtubs, showers, sinks, rusted with the poisoned effort of a conduit no longer able to transport such noxious effluvium. I had already put in a five-year stint in New York. I grew to despise it.
New York is a city that fears, yet embraces its own reflection. A gruesome portrait of decay, mortality, failure, fraud, whose caricatures are trapped inside a negatively charged environment whose collective scream is drowned out by the next drink, the next drug, the next lousy fuck.
The Arab boy from a Midtown shoe shop.
The Puerto Rican drug dealer from Spanish Harlem.
The black crackhead from Brooklyn.
The Egyptian magician moonlighting as a cab driver.
The Nicaraguan poet from the Lower East Side.
Crappy rock bands and their roadies.
The cruel Hasidics who preferred pinching to pussy.
Teenage virgins from New Jersey.
The hot blond sailer from Montreal who fucked me straight into the hospital after a three-day Ecstasy binge, his huge prick irresistible, awesome. Damaging.
One-night stands that sometimes dragged on for weeks, months. I’d trip into someone else’s daydreams, to suddenly wake up one morning and be done with them. Still living with J.G., who would listen patiently to a string of self-perpetuating obscenities, whose mounting horror he allowed me to catalog, as if his was the analyst’s couch. By the end of our relationship, he needed therapy. A retreat from my sickness. Pathological intoxication set in. Alcoholism, insecurity complex, insanity. Addiction. And he still put up with me.
I knew I had to divorce myself from a city that offered up an endless influx of temporary distractions served like junk food. Had to detox myself from the convulsive miasma of mindless activity whose goal may indeed be to overstimulate, but whose resultant conclusion merely configures delusions of a grandeur that forever remains elusive. Bars, after-hours clubs, concerts, galleries, conversations which hoodwink your time and energy by convincing you of their urgency. The only pressing problem was waste removal. The need to cut out, cut off, all that conspires to distract.
Enter the Spanish Nazi.
He was born addicted to heroin on the nineteenth of March 1971 in the L.A. County Community Hospital. Conceived in hate, abuse began in the womb. Another unwanted, unwelcomed Latin loser. He came out screaming, contorted in pain. Twisted faces grimaced at the sight of another newborn junkie saddled with the sins of his father. Papa left Mama before the delivery hoping to score a dime-bag, to celebrate the arrival, celebrate that the baby wasn’t born deformed or brain dead, after all of Mama’s beatings. Just a little bit fucked up.
Papa never returned after busting up his bike on the way back from East L.A. where the local cholos insisted he join them in a toast to his first and only newborn son. Jack and smack didn’t mix too well and Papa took a spill which wiped the shit-eating grin clear off his puss.
Mama didn’t mind too much, blind to every need except the gnawing in her belly, the bruises between her skinny legs, and the unscratchable bitch of her addiction. She took the next shot on the delivery table twelve minutes after the prodigal son was shat out like a watermelon. Smuggled it in in the pocket of her housecoat.
His first meal was a weaning of methadone and morphine, a failed attempt to quell the spasms racking through his bloated little belly. He kicked and cried and tried to wish himself dead in the cradle of the nursery surrounded by other undeserving unfortunates. All
victims of boozy blood fucks, lust, ritual gangbangs. None, however, was less wanted than him. None more tempered with a vengeance to destroy a world that dared to condemn him to a life sentence under a rule of pain and hate. And never was there destined to become a more hate-filled fucker than him.
Black is the color of my true love’s hair. Creamy cocoa skin, the son of a devil’s advocate grew up with a chip on his shoulder the size of Boulder Dam. At the age of four he was beaten into his first coma by Mommy’s latest lover. Back in the L.A. County Community Hospital, he remained for three weeks as they traced the swelling and clotting. Hoping it wouldn’t turn into permanent brain damage. The contusion suffered from the big black man’s hand left a delicate scar on his right eyebrow. That he lived was a shining testimonial to his predestined mission. A lifelong tribunal littered with the scarring of the self-serving.
At six he played witness to the degenerate urges of a third-generation coven of practicing devil worshippers. Passed from mouth to crack to cock, his mother initiated him into the Church of Satan. One of the many fuck toys brought into the delirious circle of the chronically demented. He was taught to please others and enjoy the natural desires he was too young to deny himself of. He quickly became an insatiable suitor in pursuit of his own pleasures. At the world-weary age of ten he had already instigated an involvement with the next door neighbors, a family of eleven, who took turns unleashing their multiple frustrations on his tender hide. Mother, grandmother, father, sons, and daughters from six to sixty-two beat at his bound-and-gagged body, calling out the names of both saints and sinners. Like Christians at the altar of worship, they prodded, poked, and pronged themselves into his willing flesh; cursing in the name of Satan and Salvation, they cleansed themselves of evil influence using him as a receptacle of their perverted restitutions. The weekly beatings went on for two years.
